Canucks: Elias Pettersson wants 'revenge'

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Elias Pettersson says he is fully fighting-fit and ready to go, even with more than a month to go before training camp.

That’s the message he delivered to NHL.com’s Peter Ekholm this week as the Canucks’ No. 1 centre joined up with 34 other Swedish national teammates for a Olympic training camp.

And the words Pettersson used in his discussion with Ekholm do stand out.

First of all, there’s the message everyone’s keying on: He’s out for “revenge”.

Against whom wasn’t exactly laid out, but the meaning does seem self-evident — Pettersson is very, very motivated to not have a repeat of his abysmal 2024-25 season, where he tallied just 45 points and was a non-entity most nights.

It’s unlikely we will yet get the full picture of just how last season went so badly wrong for him — such as the full details underpinning the rift between him and former teammate J.T. Miller — but even in his discussion with Ekholm there were clues.

“I’m learning from what happened last year to be a more mature player going into (this season),” he said, for instance. That seems an acknowledgement of the criticism he took from former coach Rick Tocchet and senior managers Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin, that he wasn’t anywhere near fit enough when he arrived at training camp last fall.

His testing numbers were poor, especially in contrast with Miller’s, who came into camp truly in outstanding shape, wanting to build off the team’s majestic 2023-24 season, when they had lost in the second round of the playoffs to the Edmonton Oilers, the eventual Stanley Cup runners-up. The Canucks had won the division by playing committed defensive hockey and also burying every chance they were presented on offence.

As a team, they knew the offence was unlikely to repeat as well as it did the season before, but they still believed they could score enough to remain a strong force in an evermore-competitive Pacific Division.

Allvin and Tocchet had cautioned the team that the 2024-25 campaign would be tougher than the year before. They were now the hunted after all. Miller and others took heed of this. Pettersson, dealing with some knee tendinitis at the very least, either couldn’t take heed because of the ailment, or quite simply didn’t.

Either way, it’s clear in his vow — and his declaration that he is fully injury-free — that there won’t be a repeat of last season’s disappointing preparation. The Canucks surely hope so. They need him to be his 102-point-player best. The guy that was stunning on so many nights in 2022-23. The guy who was one of the NHL’s stars of the month in January 2024, the last truly good month of hockey we’ve seen from him.

He has been a shadow of that high-octane player since.

“Right now, I don’t have any injuries that kept me off workouts,” he declared to Ekholm. “But obviously, last season was tough. With that said, the lessons are learned. I’m just really hungry to have a good season.”

So are Canucks fans. They want their superstar back.

WE HARDLY KNEW YE — Former Canucks farmhand Brady Keeper announced his retirement this week at 29. Keeper was brought in before the 2021-22 season as a potential right-handed depth defenceman, but a brutally broken leg at the end of training camp derailed those plans and his career. He spent the whole season on the injured list, only returning to practices at the tail end. He played for Abbotsford in 2022-23 and then the Laval Rockets in 2023-24, but said in an Instagram post this week he never fully recovered, his surgically-repaired leg is still causing discomfort. After a year not playing at all, he realized it was time to hang up his skates. Sport can be brutally unfair and cruel.

pjohnston@postmedia.com